What is the DVDO Quick 6?

The £399 Quick 6 is an up-to-the-minute HDMI switchbox featuring a plethora of HDMI connection options and which claims to support, crucially, both 4K and MHL signals. In other words, it’s a potentially hugely useful future-proofing upgrade for an existing home theatre system – especially if your AV receiver is getting a bit long in the tooth.

DVDO Quick 6: Design and Connections

The DVDO Quick 6 is, as we often see with these sort of devices, a rather industrial looking piece of kit with its heavy-duty metal, grilled bodywork and straightforward rectangular shape. However, its slimness, granular finish and cute little bulge on the front panel just about do enough to make it look like a domesticated device rather than something that’s escaped from a science lab.

The business end of any switchbox, of course, is its rear - and the rear of the Quick 6 isn’t messing about. The most important discoveries are two HDMI outputs, and a whopping six HDMI inputs (hence the Quick 6 name). But these are joined by coaxial and optical digital audio outputs, a serial port for system control integration, and a USB port via which you can update the unit’s firmware.

This latter connection is a great touch in this fast-changing AV world, and is not something we’d necessarily expect to find on such a cheap switchbox.

Having two HDMI outputs enables you to, for instance, output signals to two different screens, or to output HDMI video to a display device while you route HDMI audio to an AV receiver.

Both the HDMI outputs and inputs are, crucially, able to handle 300MHz streams. This is the source of the Quick 6’s grand 4K-capable claims – though we’ll need to examine these claims in considerably more depth later. The HDMIs also support Audio Return Channel functionality, and two of the HDMI inputs are labelled ‘MHL’, which is short for Mobile High-Definition Link. These two HDMIs enable you to connect mobile phones and tablets to your TV with up to 1080p/60fps video quality and up to 7.1 surround sound. Such connections are currently very rare in the usually rather slow-moving AV switcher world, despite their obvious usefulness.